The disclosure relates to assessment of imagination and ideation, the process of forming ideas or mental images. More particularly, the methods and systems described herein relate to self-assessment of individual imagination and ideation.
Many entities that offer measurements of performance (e.g., of employees or students) conventionally do so through standardized tests. Standardized tests provide valuable accountability. However, standardized tests do not provide accountability for the vital skills that lead to innovation. By way of example, there are tests that attempt to measure “creativity” but fall short of predicting the scope of an individual's imagination; divergent thinking, for example, is limited to one mode of creative thinking and a test for assessing such thinking would not address a level of imagination over time. Furthermore, divergent thinking tests have a low correlation with creative achievement. As another example, in some conventional tests, participants are asked to solve “brain teaser” problems that require “thinking outside the box”; while these tests may demonstrate mental agility, they also fall short of predicting the scope of the test taker's imagination. Such tests tend to be more a test of a participant's foreknowledge of a problem-solving technique—not measuring creativity. In a society and economy fueled by innovation and seeking creativity, imagination is the seed of innovation and the spark for creativity. However, imagination resides in the individual mind, as personal as the iris of the human eye. Imagination is typically considered fluid and unpredictable; it is considered a skill that appears to wither from disuse. Conventional systems for testing imagination follow conventional testing processes: a test is designed by an expert, administered on one day, and then evaluated by the same expert or those with a similar level of expertise. What is conventionally measured, therefore, is how well the test taker fulfills the test designer's and the test evaluator's concepts of imagination at one particular moment of time.